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About Katie

On her new Surrender EP, Montreal’s Alexia Avina creates sweeping vocal loops that feel like soft branches fluttering their fresh, raw buds. A bedroom pop album inspired by emotional floods and the vulnerability of starting again, the delicate 5-track EP was recorded in bursts using a Boss RC-50 loop station. With light synth bells used as punctuation, francophone samples, low-key guitar melodies, and Avina’s angelic, airy vocals, this is an album for morning meditations, basking in the sun, feeling the grass tickle the back of your legs, staring up at nothing at all.

Best Tracks: who will go out with a friend and thought we would stay

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Check out the music video for if i’m the one that you need by Miriam Brellenthin.

Montreal’s Régis Victor’s Dix-sept titres de la République du Civou is unlike anything I’ve heard before. Split into two halves, face jaune et face bleue, the album stabs its way through a musique concrète jungle in the dark, poking glittering eyes with a heated sword.

The album opens with Zinc, a discordant argument between rattling percussion and ascending flute shepard tones (the ascending staircase illusion of music). Saxophones and infrequent piano notes attempt to moderate, but the flute and skins are persistently stubborn.

On Doug, wooden mallets smash with abandon; warbling, hesitant synths dips their toes into far waters only to slink away behind black trees. The caucophony is punctured by the descent of glassy bells, droning racecar zoom of samples, and grumbling assorted vocal snippets.

When vocals do appear on Isosceles Not A Centipede, they sit removed and docile behind a strange sound that reminds me of a rubberized machine.

The album’s first half—face jaune—is urgent, anxious, confusing, yet confident. It drills and drives towards the album’s second half—face bleue—which carries a deferential playfulness, drawing more from electronic instrumentation than the wild acoustics of the former.

With vocals that stroke against throbbing dance rhythms and plucked harp samples, Ice Pix’s echoing production brings to mind singing to one’s self in the resonant bathroom of an all-night abandoned church rave. With hollowed out vocals flowing over hallowed ground, Ice Pix is delicate, nodding, and curious to see where the night might take it. Let it take you too.